Hot Wheels Breaks World Record At Indy 500 To Promote Facebook Page

Want to get people to "like" your Facebook page? Well you could hold a fun contest, focus on providing fans with kickass content, or ask customers to like your page in your weekly newsletter. Or, if you’re like Hot Wheels, you could just break a world record!

Want to get people to like your Facebook page? Well you could hold a fun contest, focus on providing fans with kickass content, or ask customers to like your page in your weekly newsletter. Or, if you’re like Hot Wheels, you could just break a world record. That’s right—over the weekend Hot Wheels uploaded a video to YouTube of a mysterious “Yellow Driver” breaking the world record for distance jump in a four-wheeled vehicle. The catch? To find out who the driver is you’ve got to like the Hot Wheels Facebook page.
The Facebook page is promoted both in a text annotation within the YouTube video of the record breaking jump itself, and in the video’s description. There’s even an advertisement for the Hot Wheels Facebook page on the landing ramp of the course where the Yellow Driver broke the record. The driver’s face is blurred out and to find out who he is, well, you’ll have no choice but to like Hot Wheels on Facebook.

When you arrive at Facebook.com/HotWheels, a welcome page greets you that tells you, “‘Like’ now to reveal the identity of the yellow driver and view never-before seen footage of his jump.” Doing so will let you view “exclusive” home page footage of the mysterious Yellow Driver, read news and updates and take a quiz to find out which Hot Wheels driver you are.

Of course, if all you’re really interested in is who the Yellow Driver is, you can find that out on the Hot Wheels YouTube channel, but it was a pretty genius marketing stunt on the part of Hot Wheels to use the world record to drive fans to Facebook by masking his identity. Not to mention, a great way to not only get kids hyped about Hot Wheels, but to grab the attention of all the grown men (and women) who used to play with Hot Wheels as kids and might want to get back into the mini car collection game. The timing was also perfect, kicking off the 100th Indy 500. The page has 407,000 likes right now. It will be interesting to see how this number grows as a result of the world record campaign.

Check out the world record jump in the video below, which already has racked up over 500,000 views, and let us know what you think in the comments below. The Yellow Driver flew a whopping 332 feet through the air after dropping 10 stories down 90 feet of track. Pretty sick, right?

Megan O’Neill is the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times. Megan covers everything from the latest viral videos to online video news and tips, and has a passion for bizarre, original and revolutionary content and ideas.